IX Tab - Spindle & The Bregnut Tree

Well, I finally finished the IX Tab album; it's called Spindle & The Bregnut Tree and it's available from here, if you're interested... along with a host of guff and goans about it...

There's a full colour (sort of) 4 page CD booklet with associated information about all the tracks plus a not at all full colour leaflet with the early copies. Limited to 50 or so copies, unless I get more printed...

If it helps, it's sort of themed on West Country bad turns and lost tidings; all of the tracks mean something to me, maybe to you... and there's guest appearances by the usual suspects: Doris Stokes, Glenn Close, Austin Osman Spare, Marshall Applewhite, Gene Hackman, Rock Hudson, Nietzsche, Crackling Dubb and Olivia Newton John...

12 tracks, 70+ minutes of fine slurr, lost sound, crackled graft and logbeats...

You've heard this one:

But here's another:

Ponycore/Broniecore

Late as ever to the party but...

Yeah. A My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic based continuuuuum. Eating all, spitting them out in multi-coloured goo; replace acid with skittles and here's your audio toxin, a Brasseye slab of cake...

In fact, simply add skittles (& maybe a sprinkle of magic dust) to acid and then start fucking around on Fruity Loops... this is the music FL was designed for; this is the music in FL's bad bones...

You have to love humans. This is perhaps another meta-genre /non-genre, a mere s(l)ideshow and circus, but I like that the collective can just take something and run with it, vomiting all the way. The lightning quick, feeble-minded stew of 4chan is brilliant at this kind of thing; inspiring bad trips and lost hours in bedrooms all over the world. It strikes me that the producers responsible for these minorly brilliant atrocities will have super-short half lives and the names will disappear almost as quickly as they've arrived (as Zizek says, it seems harder to image a ponycore revival in 2023 than the end of capitalism) but this is it's prime strength... the imagination run wild, stuffed with bad tidings and loosely tied ends.

This is, I guess, analogous to the kids' TV sampling debacles of the late 80s, early 90s (Sesame Treet, Charly, Roobarb) but with an elan and an elasticity that seems less cynical and more, well, if there's a internet meme-based definition of polymorphously perverse....

And yeah, you'll hear a lot of Rustie in there too if you're as old as me...

But oddpop exists...

It's mostly dubstep, 8bit, techno-popping, electronica of course, but the genre is elastic enough to include death metal as well:

These are not necessarily exemplars but there's ome demented mixtapes here, for starters. Tread carefully. As Lautreamont said, at the beginning of Maldoror:

"This is not for you."

High Wolf & The Lycans

Because I was listening to High Wolf on the bus late last night and a werewolf got on. It freaked quite a few people out; one guy moved away so quickly he almost fell over. The werewolf smelled of weed, oddly enough and only lasted two stops before heading off into the night, perhaps to rub Virgin fat onto his alopecia-ing chesthair.... I know what you're thinking but it was a werewolf, a lycan, they used to be all around here, you used to be able to spot them out of the corner of your eyes, just before they dissolved into the bracken... they were relatively harmless then, the odd bite, the odd scratch and sniff... many of them were young, cubs even, barely more dangerous than the torch-wielding feral kids being chucked out of the Action Zone slums of Bridgy...

But still, the Lycans are creeping back. This one was an adult male - red eyed, yellow-toothed, hair like a dirty ripped dress. He looked like he meant business. Haven't seen them in a while. Not this type. They've been lying low, perhaps afraid of all the publicity, perhaps annoyed at how shitty the novels about them have been. Last time they were this out in the open is back in the CJD farm-culls...

Interesting. I'll keep you posted.

Other than that, High Wolf's donated organ tumbles are quite fetching, I think. Diverting. A little transporting. Tiny little squiggles of puff. Substantially insubstantial. Better than Ferraro et al, I think; more.... honest. Makes me think I need to start taking extra gulps of cough syrup.

Steven Gerrard Must Go

...I love Steven Gerrard, he's my favourite player, perhaps ever... he's an oddly shaped antelope, a boy-faced Egyptian God, a chisel-haired football legend... he's the dark beating heart of Liverpool FC, the boy wonder with guts and bones to spare... he's been brilliant for Liverpool, loyal in a world of spun-out capitalist scree (I'm reading Zizek at the moment); he'd have genuinely played football for free, never even seemed all that bothered by the other trappings of Premiership footballing (the blur of endorsements, the smudge of lipstick on orange-peel skin, the tug of heartstrings and nightclubs - a fracas here, a loose tongue there, nothing critical or defining, nothing McAvennie, nothing Nicholas, nothing Cole)

I love Steven Gerrard but he must leave Liverpool.

This season, it's been embarrassing... for him, for the fans, for the rest of the team. He's still been good, I don't subscribe to the idea flitting around the media that he's had a bad season particularly - it's not his passes that have gone astray, it's that his team mates have been standing in the wrong place.

Time and time and time again. His pass completion rates must be shot to hell. His body language couldn't of got more mangled. When Torres was fit we looked a much better side, of course and I think Gerrard and Torres were about the most lethal attacking combination in the league but... even when they were playing together there was something amiss, something bigger than both of them... an arch psychological impediment that seemed to stem from Gerrard and flow outwards....



Gerrard must go because he's got so good, has become so essential, so integral, that his team mates are scared of playing... you can see it in their eyes, the millisecond of panic, the fractional glance across the pitch towards him when the ball's coming towards them... good players gone bad because there's someone on their team they feel the need to refer to before playing their game...

It's a small thing, a doubt that I'm sure the other Liverpool players think they're dismissing, but it's a cold virus, affecting their judgement... they're like trainee astronauts, struggling with decompression, with anoxia...

Gerrard's not a bully, not a yeller or a screamer, not a Carragher... his motivation comes from his belief, from his actions on the pitch... but the belief must be dimming now, even in someone so in love with the game and his club and the actions are inhibiting his team mates... he passes to a place where they should be, the ball goes out, he's already running for the return, he turns and he's not even angry, just disappointed... the farce starts up again...

Liverpool don't have any other Steven Gerrard's waiting in the wings, but they have good players who could be much better... in the occasions when he's off the pitch, you can almost see the relaxation... in the moments when Aquilani or (especially) Lucas forget themselves and start playing unfettered by Gerrard's silent expectancy you can see flashes of inspiration... it's not Gerrard's fault but I think he has to go...

unless...

unless...

he could stay if Liverpool could recruit a calm, older head in midfield, a Gary McCallister figure to keep things ticking, someone unfussed by reputation, someone clicking to their own desires...

Alonso was critical as we all knew he would be because he wasn't worried by Gerrard, was old beyond his years, was content to not be the star but to be a starmaker, wasn't brain-stormed by Gerrard's presence, could keep his head, could stand in the right place to receive the ball...

If they reunite at Real Madrid they really will make that team immaculate... it'll break his heart but at least, for a season, we're unlikely to meet him coming the other way...

If there's someone out there who could save Gerrard for Liverpool, if there's a McCallister, then the new Manager needs to buy now or else let Gerrard go and let the existing players free, to see where they go with their freedom, to see if Lucas et al really could be amazing players...

The new manager might need to cut off the head to save the body.

Colleen-ing

Keep hearing Colleen on soundtracks, through windows, in other people's lives... Missed her somehow in my life; an artist I think I feel I should know better. Who's to tell? All the stuff I hear sounds great, is that representative?


Even to me, this feels more like a Tweet. Mixed Mediatosis.

Colleen - Summer Water

Colleen - The Heart Harmonicon

Lost the will to separate. Perhaps temporary.

'Francis likes to talk' - Watson on Crick.

Maybe Colleen is here too, alongside Dawkins on Genius of Britain. She is getting everywhere.

Colleen - The Golden Morning Breaks

I can't write without italics. Not sure why. Or rather, think i know but would prefer to look away. Will return to this maybe. Always return.

Curse this rotten Wytch Machine.



From The Wytch Machine...

The Versatile Henry Mancini

Picture stolen from this little treasure trove, where you can probably steal the album too

I hear the word 'versatile' and it's only ever about sex. It's an unsure word, plenty of slippage. I don't know what we're supposed to imagine that Henry can do... Can we use him as an occasional table, a water pipe, a way to stop motorists speeding through villages?

I want to use him. I do. I'm gonna use him in just a minute, before I get into the shower.

I'm gonna Pink Panther him up.

And then I'm gonna have a crack at that Reynols interview thing, also on here.

John Peel's Ambient Stew

Maybe this has already happened.

An album, vinyl only. A treasure trove. An ambient stew to help 30,40,50,60-somethings sleep through their night terrors, their fear that 6Music might be sacrificed to the Gods of public ownership...

An ambient stew. Every record they've ever heard (Gentle Giant tugs at Ivor Cutler tails off into The Frank Chickens which grins at Bogshed who opens the heart of 70 Gwen Party and nails cLOUDDEAD), pulled together and undistorted and smoothed into a thick indie paste and above it all, in the mix and above, there's John Peel's voice...

...he's just talking, unrelated words spilling, following the ups and downs of slightly warped records, wrong-speeded...

...just words coming out - "flexi, fanzine, sorry..."

...the words are irrelevant, as always.... it's the tone people are after, the tone they need to help them drift off into an older, more naive world...

and these words are taken and stewed into some broken-back beats (maybe some Bolt Thrower / Electro Hippie echo(ic) trails, just audible in the background), maybe tangling with guitars in the breakdown but not letting anything get too whiny...

...because these people who can't sleep are OVER that now... they've found their little indie girls, or settled for a Coldplay fan with a rack to die for... or settled for someone who looks like Cheryl Cole but doesn't mind Bon Iver...

The album - the price sticker is as much of the art as anything - will be missing the crapness, the ARCH of the Covenant but it'll remind them of older times, gathered around the wireless or the (ahem) Ghetto Blaster... remind them of the hard click and soft burr of a tape-to-tape machine... remind them that there was once a time when music was for amateurs, when all they ever wanted was an appearance on the already failing Snub TV...

This ambient stew, this Mogadon haze

(Janice Long's voice as an undertow)

Will keep them - US? - safe from harm.

There must be plenty of Peel out there, unlicensed, doing no more. A thousand tiny Peel sessions, micro-moduled into submission, made passive and re-charged...

There could be a series of albums, one or each night of the week, for each month of the year.

Turn on, listen, crackle, sleep.

Like leaving the fridge open.

There's people out there that need to sleep.


UPDATE: It's possible this has been thought of long before by non other than Delia Derbyshire, the pert, uber-geek's knob twiddler of choice. She always gets there before me.

I say possible because I'm at work and haven't actually heard this yet. Still, shot in the dark...

Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson - John Peel's Voice

Paul Young's Love Will Tear Us Apart

...is (deep breath) still my favourite version of the song. Not only do I have the same confession as Liz (though why we feel the need to confess, I'm still working on); that Paul Young's version was the first I heard but also that when I heard the Joy Division version a few years later I thought it was a ropey Paul Young cover - and in fact, that's how I still see things now.

When No Parlez came out I was perhaps 11 or 12 and Love Will Tear Us Apart played a significant part in an early on-off relationship I had with a spectacularly endowed (for 12) girl who perhaps I ought to have been better off being mates with. The cruelty and despair of love wasn't really available to me then, I didn't understand yet how much of a gut-kicking emotion it could be but this song seemed to hint at other ways that love could take you; darker ways, paths only hinted at by my understanding of girls and passion and so on at that time.

There was a darkness here, a love that pulled you under, a love that could tear you apart.

This was all intensified by Paul Young. He had a clear, untainted voice and paired with these dark mysterious lyrical images, I can remember being very unsettled, an unusual feeling when mostly I was listening to stuff like Wham! or The Style Council or maybe at the indie top end The Jam (who, anyway, I liked for the same reason as I liked The Specials - you could dance to them without looking like a twat in School Disco's - the interest in social commentary came later).

When I hear Ian Curtis singing it, or later Michael Gira or Robert Smith or Nick Cave or whoever, they seemed to miss the point of the song; it didn't work for me coming from those kinds of mewled, blank, seen-it-all faces, the song couldn't be captured by people who already knew these paths. It was a dark light that Paul and me and her were discovering for ourselves.

I can remember me and her playing this in her bedroom and the feeling that somehow this was a wormhole into new, undiscovered, country was almost unbearable. It used to make her cry and it confused the hell out of me why she'd want to keep playing it. This was pre-sex, pre-understanding. I wasn't sure how things could ever turn out between a man and a woman, much less a girl and a boy who only a few before had been happily rolling in fields with no lingering sexual tension, no real understanding of gender at all...

This song, sung by Paul Young caught a frozen moment in our adolescence and meant that no songs would be the same again. I can still feel this song and no matter what anyone says: the Joy Division version is a lost and ropey cover.

Jandek Kind Of Day...

Having a Jandek kind of day. Not in a good way.

Jandek - Straight 30 seconds

Jandek - Honey

Bloggers' WAGs is Go

A repository of the astute, mischievous, blase, rat-infested, paranoiac, half-baked, half-arsed, beatific, mendacious, sorry-owled, frivolous, crepuscular, moon-addled, canny, circumspect, broked-limbed, supercilious, sanguine and blown-fused critical comments from the wives and girlfriends of your favourite, self-esteemed, male cultural critics and bloggers. Inspired by a throwaway comment that perfectly encapsulated the life-work of David Bowie - "Murgh, murgh, murgh; I live on Mars" - this attempts to find the real truth behind the multiple metaphors and verbal pile-ups of the blogging world and keeps begging the question: "How much of the incandescent NOW will be remembered in the clip-shows of the future?"

I'm hoping this will end up being hugely inappropriate and sagely informative in more or less equal measures. Let's see. As ever, if you want to get involved, add your own WAG (or HAB) etc then drop me a line with your email and I'll invite you to join...

Gola Trance (Screen Test Degradation) Redux

With [] to the likes of Kek, Doppel[], K-punk...
The secret of Hauntology lies in the corners, the liminal frames of the photographs. No, it's not what you're thinking; nothing remotely Ligotti or even The Dark Is Rising about it.

Nothing Green Knowe.

Memories from the Haunted Ballroom is a series of soft-focus delirial-oneiric versions of Twenties and Thirties tearoom pop tunes, the original numbers drenched in so much reverb that they have dissolved into a suggestive audio-fog, the songs all the more evocative now that they have been reduced to hints of themselves. Thus Al Bowlly's 'It's All Forgotten Now'

It's no surprise that[ ] hid at first because it's only [ ] you suddenly understand where they are coming from. The critics who argue that hauntology is nostalgic are missing the point entirely; this is not at all about looking back fondly but rather the desire to reanimate SOMETHING [ ]; a kind of rose tint in reverse.

To understand, you need to look at the(ir) trainers.

The picture of [ ] (etc) in the June edition of The Wire [ ]; Gola trainers, even now partially hidden.

The Caretaker - what a world, what a life, what a love

Simple, classic styling with a nice bit of suede or canvas, possibly a gum sole here or there and you won't go far wrong. If they look like they've been stolen from a school gym circa 1979 then you've hit the jackpot. We've been campaigning for Gola to introduce some retro "heelies" but we don't think they're gonna deliver the goods. Bottlers.

Yeah, now they've found a way to be cool; even made a virtue of their [ ] (instead of the Adidas Littbarskis you were after). Everyone living in the hinterlands of the 70s and 80s, the upper reaches of the classic 'Ghost Box era' (from Gutterbreakz) will recognise The Gola trance, the slipped disc look [ ]. It's something that would have shaped most kids* around the classic [ ] Steel, Children Of The Stones, Screen Test era and it's not surprising that it's these sounds that find themselves worthy of excavation. By reclaiming these sounds, The Caretaker, The Ghost Box boys et al, can also reclaim the false consciousness that pretended that these [ ] were okay, had something about them, were somehow non-conformist.

((([ ] non-conformity didn't have the same allure then, did it?)))

And this angst runs deep; keeps wrecking dreams way after the individuals have come to terms with their own status, keeps haunting....

If the Anterograde sessions used Kubrick’s The Shining as their conceptual kick-off point, then the Death of Rave series occupies another sort of haunted ballroom. Kirby wiped rave music of its musical signifiers to create something that sounded hollowed-out and spectral, a sort of MDMA-depleted snapshot of a 1990 Leeds warehouse party. And, somewhere along the way, he managed to make ambient music sound cool again.

Cf; Burial - the lost spaces being the music. Burial hid like hell because of the Gola Trance he found himself remembering... you hardly need mdma-depletion...

And anyway ---- MDMA damage is neurologically aligned to STM rather than LTM i.e. the inability to create new memories rather than the loss of exisiting ones... a theme which was mentioned in the liner notes to The Caretaker's first collection but then gradually, ironically, degraded into a whole other beast...

A shame, because anterograde amnesia explain hauntology as a theory better than anything (of course people are looking at reinventing the past; they've forgotten that the present exists - a kind of awful reversal of that John Peel dictum:

"People ask me, ‘what was the best year for music?’ I always say, 'This year is the best year for music. Prior to that it was the previous year"

I also get a little twitchy re: the nuum(b)ness that seems to be pervading the blog hallways these days...

And as for (often the same) people wishing for the heady days of the early 1990s... when rave crossfired into jungle.... well, in my experience that's when music also started to reassert it's masculinity again; the early days of Jungle round these parts saw girls heading for the hills while the boys spasticked along to the beats in sweaty, disconcerting waves...

I'm not saying that these boys had difficulties with girls and were grateful when they all left and started listening to happy house and psytrance but...

;)

(((maybe not))) - i'm still stuttering; at the unfortunate My Generation stage of development; can't feel that the past needs to be better because i had Puma and, annoyingly, I still have Puma.... though once they were black and white and now they are pink and purple... the analysis of that shouldn't be too difficult...

Rave didn't die, perhaps?



Yeah, Sapphire and Steel was scary, for a zeitgeist [ ] hugging child [] slow for slow's sake []

We shouldn't be [ ] unknown here (((((((())))))))) isn't ontological, it's just logical; an extension of the way TV worked back then. S and S is creepy and unfinished, a real stare into the abyss... [ ] 3-2-1's arcane symbolic systems meant to be - Levi-Strauss would have struggled with Ted Roger's semiotic ((((())))))

The conceit of The Caretaker's Memories from the Haunted Ballroom has the simplicity of genius: a whole album's worth of songs that you might have heard playing in the Gold Room in The Shining's Overlook Hotel.

Being in a Gola Trance [ ] those savage Green Flashes a while back [ ]

You go round to Ghost Box HQ and look at their trainers, you know what you'll find.

*[]

Aloha(tings) In Notting Hill

For some reason this picture has deeply unsettled me. I can't put my finger on it. I mean, it's obviously meant to be disturbing but there's something genuinely awful about it.



Maybe I glanced it once during one of my once mammoth record flipping searches in the depths of one of Notting Hill Gate's Record and Tape Exchanges - a glance that kills slowly, like a one-inch punch, worming through the system, undetected, waiting for someone to activate it by innocently posting the sleeve...

I don't even know why it reminds me of record flipping.

Or why it reminds me of Notting Hill (could this be the reason I don't like the film as well?). Could this be everyone else's reason too?

Maybe it's some kind of accidental post-hypnotic suggestion; the quick flicking of all those cut price records in those dimly lit basements acting like an accidental flip book, accidentally full of arcane commands... like the light flickering through lines of trees along the motorway, sending people crazy, sending drivers off into hallucinatory states, into dream sleep, messing with their alpha beats.... like Native Americans using their fingers to make dream machines out of the Sun...

...thinking about it, there was always an auditory element to the record flicking in the basement as well... the sounds of slapping record sleeves, making tiny micro-rhythms... the beginnings of Mille Plateux glitches? Slap slap slap... vaguely pornographic, easing the way into the unconscious... the nodding head symbolic of the nodding off into semi-consciousness - (Peter) Tripping into some vaguely altered state with no redeeming functionality....

anyone who's been in there, or an equivalent record store can recognise the symptoms, can see where dubstep came from...


...sometimes I used to flip two rows of LPs at a time, forcing one eye to watch each row (or rather forcing both eyes to separate, to obsessively monitor for bargains, to pan for Gold...)

(((((someone on here once tried to answer the question: what do you see if you pull out both eyes and face them towards each other...))))

... maybe something there caused that Henry Kaiser LP to slip into my barely conscious... maybe it combined with the seeping scum leeching out of the never-washed leather jackets of the people in there (Crass logos, black dyed hair that looked like it was melting), flicking alongside me as if they were humans too...

Or maybe I'm making too much of this because, on another level, this picture makes me feel weird too:

Amethyst Deceivers Hidden Track

Had the Moon's Milk album since the day it was released and I never realised there was a hidden live version of Ametheyst Deceivers until last week, when it came home and surprised the shallows out of me. Considering how autistic I've been about Coil since around 1987 (the cover notes to Scatology opening wormholes of knowledge that attract masculine energy - i.e. autism and obsession - like the swords and gongs from the How To Destroy Angels 12" never could), it's somehow reassuring that there's still stuff out there (or in there) that has passed me by...

RHOd(amn)esia - a review of Kempernorton's latest without hearing it

Rho - a value of 100; Moment, Um (Ohn?) or: the endtime for RNA synthesis and
((((Road)))
Rhode(s)- and associated Colossus; Helios archetypes... Sunburned Hands of God
Damn - the exclusion from Heaven or the separation from the GODhead; the Rhett row...
Amnesia - Fugue in E (Morris Dancer) Minor - a cow's eye looking at the pathway to the Tannery at Pittards; yellow elbowed men from the sticks, eyes burned by chemical vapour...

Kempernorton's road roaming, in music... ripping the wheel from the Motorik: Kraftwerk's Autobahn, Neubaten's Onomatopeic Nnnaaammm, various Highways to Hell...

British Roads mostly resolutely not motorik, not beat-driven but altogether slow and crumbly and ambient... glitches abound, mis-steps, fumbles, false starts - Elvis's Are You Lonesome Tonight dissolving into man-giggles and choking makes much more sense as a soundtrack to West Country roads....

Kempernorton is keeping with his Sus-Sex theme but he's a W/C lad at heart, can't not be...

So...

Comus perhaps... the stop/start, the possibility of burning Christians in the fields... Comus the band and the deity.... The Wicker Man outside Bridgwater, Junction 23, sunk in a trench to avoid the

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

of local Bridgey boys, confused and aroused at a bare wicker bottom...



... the Westonzoyland Road.... past the old abandoned airstrip, now full of kids learning to drive in clapped out taxi cabs .... a territory mapped out in another life by JG Ballard... Psychogeographers in the surrounding woods, digging out trenches, hiding in Hides, watching the anthropology unfold...

The 303... the squiggle and the sound of deer hitting your windpipes... the related sound of the car behind licking it's lips...

80s style burst johnnies..... Nnnaaammm

Roadtrip to Sutton Bingham.... The Spice must flow...

Cows burning in the fields during the Foot in The Mouth days / daze... Punch drunbk farmers wandering the fields.... walking like the Scarecrows in Dr Who... the traffic slowing down to watch and then catching the barb-e-cue smell...

More.

A Perfect Sphere

...a perfect sphere, unknown in the Forest... the shattering quiet/weird moment from Merchant Ivory's Savages... spins through the air like an electron, lands in the world of the Mud People, savages waiting for a Pop Group cover, waiting for old (not classic) Nike trainers, Puma tops...

Mark Stewart And The Maffia - Welcome To Liberty City



^^^^^^^^^^ lots more on the Pop Group, MP3s etc, here ^^^^^^^^^^

not the one with PSH and laura linney, not this one...

this one...

the one with all the Danielle Dax lookalikes...



The New Age Steppers came too late, The Slits came too late...

The New Age Steppers - Fade Away

But although the tribal tremblings of those two are perhaps the most obvious signifiers, I keep hearing CocoRosie in my head while it's playing...

CocoRosie - Promise

Bunuel is invoked of course - The Exterminating Angel quoted (I can't remember much about that film, having seen it only once, years ago but I think I can tell how this kind of thing might have lingered in the memory, since watching a series of Bunuel films on telly all that time ago I still retain some residue of what I've seen, to the extent that occasionally, when I'm tired, the world does start to look like a Bunuel film)

And there's the inevitably Freudian riff on returning to the primal...

imagine Arthur Janov, watching both these films and rubbing with glee at the prospect of the middle classes tumbling into his soft-walled centres, eager to dispel myths, eager to let it out, emotional honesty being the holy grail, emotional intelligence being the final link in the chain...

let it out, just so you can prove it was in there in the first place, let it out, just to show that all that education and cultural capital hasn't entirely muffled their spirit, their we-moon, their inner Wolf Child...

scream if you want to go faster...

The use of the croquet ball in Savages is inspired; in black and white we could be watching a wguilt wracked (but, importantly, curious) Oppenheimer uttering his now famous grammatical glitch: "...now I am become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds..." or else it tries to elaborate on a theme that would come much later in the form of



Rogue Traders - Voodoo Child

where humankind were reduced to their essence - chuckling balls of steel, time-racists --- I think the Here Come The Drums refrain throughout those two episodes is an unconscious echo... the drums are all through The Savages, turning to jazzy skitters as the primitives turn to chattering middle classes (which echoes my stepping out of Jungle and Drum N Bass - once the jazzy fills started to take over and 'intelligence' and LTJ Bukem crept into the scene, I walked away and never looked at another Drum N Bass record again...)

another story...

((((((((((( (we are all time racists) - The Pop Group song that never was, the one were the ethnological forgery really took wind and Psychic TV's Themes records were shoved into songforms that pulled society apart at the primal level, alongside bursting samples from old Batman shows and snatches of Keith Levene guitar... The Pop Group never really did it for me, no matter how many times I've come back to them and tried...I want to love them but the earnestness and hectoring and lack of humour (in everything apart from their name) always put me on the back foot, quietly whispering: Yes, I know that... even Crass didn't always preach to the converted in such an obvious way... I'll probably try again, really do want to see what others seem to see )))))))))))))

The Savages uses various forms to tell it's simple tale: mock anthropology film (which is in fact uncannily similar to the real thing - i had a brief anthropology fetish in my teens), drawing room play, surrealism, silent film... and if form and pace (we languish until we love it) dictate over content then that's only because the content isn't there and shouldn't be...

Still got the drag queens (gloriously unexplained) to work out - I guess it could be just ugly women...

Here Come The Drums...

Sacrifice, primitivism, Murderous Rage, Return to the Woods - the ending ought to be the still taken from the latest Sig Ros album cover or maybe from Von Trier's The Idiots, where idiocy is paralled with creativity in the calmest, coldest way possible - though reality TV trumps all, as always....

Like the young Martin Amis during the Oxbridge Interview in The Rachel Papers, I'm not even sure if I liked The Savages.

The Story of The Fall

The Story of The Fall blog is now complete - a monumental, practically Autistic effort and testament to a great idea, followed through. No doubt there are completists out there that'll start to nit-pick at the threads but I'd like to applaud Tommy's efforts - this is the kind of thing that the interweb is for.

Kemper Norton Collective

The first CD from the Cornish / Su-Sex Kemper Norton Collective is out now. It's a beautifully packaged little artefact - mine came with a little introductory booklet and a sample of Cornish sand (thus invoking the fiery Gods of the Department for Anti-Social Insecurity and, perhaps, Fisheries).

Despite the deliberately fragmented nature of the release - Kemper himself features on most of the tracks but there's also stuff from the Rradiant Boys, Speckle, Loic Rich (whom I vaguely remember from my early years as a paranoid chaser; [Comments Deleted Due to Misplaced Freudery and Scatologics], Singularity Jones, employeeseven and Burnthouse - there's an inhouse feel to the crackling and slurtronics that seems to suggest a kind of Hive Mind at work... as if the Borg only assimilated FE teachers, Social Science researchers, computer technicians from 1973-1979 and Arthur Machen's godchildren, steeped in bedtime stories.

The collective vision seems to be one that evokes the dreaded hauntological word while channelling some of the sludgier aspects of Four Tet (the breakbeats are more often than not broken) and even Boards of Canada.

Of course, it doesn't sound like either of those bands but there's a fellowship there, a collective memory of what music might have sounded like, had things taken a turn for the worse.

Distant drones, crackles and water drips permeate several of the tracks, seemingly dragging up Salt Marie Celeste ghosts from the Cornish seabeds and then often letting them wander around abandoned fairgrounds and Morris Dancing competitions (the kind where rival troupes start swinging their sticks and flicking each others eyes out in debates about Olde English pronounciation). The Wicker Man, obviously, but I'm also hearing a film that I only just remember seeing, Carnival of Souls as well as that Dali dream sequence from Hitchcock's Spellbound.

That said, it's not especially dark - there's a brightness in amongst the occasionally overwhelming and overlapping sound and there's real songs in there, tiny psychfolk passages that break the tension. The raven on the cover gives only part of the picture.

Unprocessed found voices break through, BOC style and remind me a little of how they're used in The Advisory Circle and some of the better tracks on Mordant Music's Dead Air i.e. they sometimes work a little against the tracks but sound all the better for it.

It's not ecstatic music, not really danceable unless you're suffering from an Asperger's hangover and sometimes it gives you the giddy feeling that it might kind of topple over, taking you with it. A sleeping cow, covered in spiderspit. This might be what you hear when deaddrunk and trying to keep the the world from spinning. In a good way.

Go to his myspace site, pay the guy a little money - it's also very cheap! - delve deeply. If you like the stuff on this site you'll like this stuff. He's got a got a few celebrity fans and he'll get more...

You know you can't resist a conversation that begins with you saying: "Course, I was kinda into them a bit back in 07, after that they got a bit, well, commercial I thought... the old CDRs were great though, still play them all the time even if the dog gets a little boss-eyed..."

Big Black Face

more sleeve-faces here

Big Black peel session here

There are only really 3 or 4 bands that I wanted to see live and never got to. Big Black were one of them. After Albini ditched the drum machine, I sort of lost interest so never saw the short-lived Rapeman or even Shellac.

The drum machine was my favourite bit.

NYE Amsterdam

Spent New Year in Amsterdam and ended up at the above, dancing like a bag of spastic elbows all night at the mysterious Ruigoord, an old hippie commune / hangout about 22km outside Amsterdam (that 22km seems a long way at 5 in the morning on freezing New Year's day). A great barnstar venue, in a village full of fog and fireworks and odd sculptures and old hippy buses and an old church that they've turned into some kind of psychedelic temple, complete with a DJ mixing dutch folk with tribal techno and oddly affecting Snow Patrol covers. Reminded me a lot of the old Megatripolis nights at Heaven, with any number of people who could be Frazer Clarke's progeny bouncing around like machine elves, tossing firecrackers and generally grinning themselves an injury.

The music was good too: none of yer poncy dubstep or minimal here, just balls-to-the-wall techno and trance - I'm as headnoddingly awed as the next man to the lure of a Villalobos remix (that Fabric 36 album is a killer, isn't it?: constantly skidding along the divide between pretension and genius / delirium and death-eating) - but sometimes (and NYE is one of those times) you just want sound to be energy, you want to feel the drums in your eyes and you want multi-coloured hippy girls dancing around you like their beads depend on it...

I buggered my leg with so much dancing...

NOTE TO SELF: adopt less frantic, less bouncy dance style for next year.

The night ended when we managed to catch a lift back to Amsterdam with some decidely dodgy, bourbon quoffing homeboy ravers in a car that seemed somehow whittled.

Anyway, the pics come courtesy of Rob Triskele's site (most of my pictures look like they've been to the cleaners). I'm in there somewhere!

It's The End Of The World

Enjoying Heroes, especially because the trailer features The End Of The World, everyone's favourite (okay - etc) Skeeter Davis song and my favourite apocaplyptic pop-country ballad. It's so resoundingly Goth it reminds me of the Pete Murphy look-a-likes that used to (still, really) hang around Yeovil College, trying to keep out of the sun (Near Dark was a big favourite, just try opening the curtains on one of them after a heavy nights drinking) and giving each other chicken scratches to ease the pain of another crap 12" by the Mission. Sweet, country voices do the end of the world better than anyone; there's already a touch of KKK fire and brimstone around the edges, lines of burning crosses like wind farms, a Rapture (for more info, see Hal) in reverse.

Skeeter nails every ventricle of the desolation of heartbreak, the spoken bit seems totally unforced, as if she simply can't keep singing... her voice sounds like she's utterly at odds with the world and is trying to maintain a little dignity in the face of totally sensory derangement and ontological disturbance, the descent into autism and egocentrism- "why does the sun go on shining? why does the sea rush to shore?" This works perfectly for Heroes, which seems to have this as a theme running through the first few episodes - I love the fact that the main characters are circling one another, not clubbing together, wanting to save the world because it's their world; there's a slight parallel with the bit of A Thousand Plateaus I'm reading (slowly) at the moment about immanence and the state of becoming animal (okay, it's a shoe-horn but the whole book is a shoe-horn into everything). There's also a chunk of Heroes that evokes the whole Marilyn Complex as well, the need to save through people...

When they become the Defenders I'll lose faith, I imagine, because I never saw Namor or the Hulk (especially Namor) ever really letting themselves be a part of a whole. I guess that was a point of irony I missed when I read the comics originally. In fact, the Silver Surfer's existential angst was all about a girl wasn't it? (I'm not going to bother looking this up - this is the internet, after all). As was the Hulks. And Namor - all fucked over in one way or another by personal loss and a hatred of humanity that stemmed directly from a hatred of one person who's not there any more. I always liked the fact that the Silver Surfer surfed - a kick in the face to the 'surfers of the world unite' mentality that's sold through the shops; his solitary approach is like the surfing community as it really is - wave rage, dissonance, feudalism, nothing remotely Swayze about it, as far as i can tell, at least not in it's British incarnation.

One day this song will be about you.

Skeeter Davis - The End Of The World

A Yousendit Wailing Wall Of Sound Production